To Heal a Fractured World

Rabbi Jonathan Sack responds to Karl Marx:

Opium of the people? Nothing was ever less an opiate than this religion of sacred discontent, of dissatisfaction with the status quo. It was Abraham, then Moses, Amos, Isaiah, who fought on behalf of justice and human dignity -- confronting priests and kings, even arguing with God himself. That note, first sounded by Abraham, never died. It was given its most powerful expression in the book of Job, surely the most dissident book ever to be included in a canon of sacred scriptures ... In Judaism, faith is not acceptance but protest, against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be. Faith lies not in the answer but the question -- and the greater the human being, the more intense the question. The Bible is not metaphysical opium but its opposite. Its aim is not to transport the believer to private heaven. Instead, its impassioned, sustained desire is to bring heaven down to earth. Until we have done this, there is work still to do.
...
It is impossible to be moved by the prophets and not have a social conscience. Their message, delivered in the name of God, is: accept responsibility. The world will not get better of its own accord. Nor will we make it a more human place by leaving it to others -- politicians, columnists, protestors, campaigners -- making them our agents to bring redemption on our behalf. The Hebrew Bible begins not with man's cry to God, but with God's cry to us, each of us, here where we are. "If you are
silent at this time", says Mordekhai to Esther, "relief and deliverance will
come from elsewhere ... but who knows whether it was not for such a time as this that you have attained royalty?" (Esth. 4:14). That is the question God poses to us. Yes, if we do not do it, someone else may. But we will then have failed to understand why we are here and what we are summoned to do. The Bible is God's call to human responsibility.

I read these words and I am thrilled by them. And I am dismayed also. I have been introduced to the Bible and to the God of Israel through Christianity, which began with the experience of the Jewish prophet Jesus. There is nothing in the record of his life in the gospels that contradicts the words of Rabbi Sacks, at least it seems so to me. Yet so much of what is Christianity does contradict what Rabbi Sacks has said. Or if it does not contradict, it simply runs off in another different and wasteful direction. What has gone wrong? So much of what is happening in evangelical Christianity appears misguided, if not fundamentally counter to this. I often wonder that Christianity, in its separate existence from Judaism, is a vast historic mistake.

Suspended for doodling

This is a gun?

This is one small piece of evidence to back up my claim that education departments in all colleges and universities in the United States should be immediately eliminated and all education degrees should be summarily declared null and void*.

The idea that there is a formal need for training in pedagogy has already been thoroughly and permanently disposed of. It's just that, like the absence of WMDs, not everyone knows it yet.

A man who knows a subject thoroughly, a man so soaked in it that he eats it, sleeps it and dreams it—this man can always teach it with success, no matter how little he knows of technical pedagogy.

-- H. L. Mencken

* Those currently with education degrees should be allowed to retain credit for their non-education courses they have taken, and allowed to then obtain legitimate degrees by fulling in the holes created in their transcripts by this belated but desperately needed correction to our public education system. Admittedly there is no ability to wipe the tainting of some of their minds accomplished by "professional education", and communist-like "re-education" would probably make things worse if that is possible to imagine. Where is Tommy Lee "Men In Black" Jones with his little red flashing light?

Motto(s) for the Cheney/Bush administration

Erasmus:

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Or perhaps, from Mark Twain:

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them. It is easier to stay out than get out.

And, here are some lines for general consumption from George Bernard Shaw:

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich--something for nothing.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.

All cribbed, with immense gratitude, from The Quotations Page.

Looks like Dean is staying South

Hurricane Dean Sinday PM

Hurricane Dean on 8/19/2007 Sunday a.m.

Hurricane Dean 08-18-2007

Image from Weather Underground.

Why I support the ACLU

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90000922

Hurricane Dean

Just for fun, I hope, starting a record of snap shots of the computer models on Hurricane Dean. This information, along with tons of other stuff, is available at Weather Underground.

The meaning of the word "evangelical".

Rev Han: This is more a comment on some of your comments during the "Jesus Camp" Sunday School, than on the sermons. Although I can see how the text, "See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ," might be applicable.

Two weeks ago you mentioned, as part of a discussion of the theological positions of the subjects of the documentary, that you thought of yourself as an "evangelical" (as the people in the documentary presumably think of themselves), and that most of the adults in the class probably thought of themselves as evangelicals also. Then last Sunday you said (in qualification of the previous Sunday's statement, perhaps?) that the term was not very well defined (at least I think this is what you said; I'm stuggling to remember the precise words).

I also think that definition is a real problem. If "evangelical" is not well defined, it is because recent (decade scale) developments have loosened what were the earlier boundaries of the generally accepted definition. Whereas I once readily admitted to being an evangelical myself, I find it very difficult to do so these days. For two reasons. One is perhaps a matter of conscience. My theological notions have "liberalized" substantially during my adult life, to the point that I am unable to agree firmly with what I believe have been a number of evangelical essentials. For example, I now say that I take the Bible seriously, but not literally. Perhaps evangelicals would say that "literalness" is not an evangelical essential; however, I perceive that I am willing to question notions about "inspiration" of the Biblical text that would make many traditional evangelicals cringe. This being said I do not want to distance myself from them. This is because I am, if anything, more enthusiastic about what I understand to be the gospel now than I was in my less theologically "liberal" days, and because of my interest in Jesus as a picture or representative of God (or at least of the God that I hope is there). Other than simple honesty there is no reason for me to distance myself from evangelicals for theological reasons.

The main issue is all the rest, of course. Evangelicals have permitted themselves to be characterized as being defined by having certain limited social concerns. These limited concerns have turned out to be attention getters in the evangelical voting community, they have been part of the public discourse of evangelicals, and while I have not heard five "evangelical" sermons in the last 20 years (outside APC that is), I am quite confident that these must be part of the discourse internal to evangelical circles. Naming two of the limited number of said concerns (and really there are a half dozen at most), abortion and the so-called sanctity of marriage, there is little if any said in the scripture about either one of these. While they are matters for serious discussion, the paucity and ambiguity of the biblical teaching in each of these matters should result in a reserved humility, rather than the outrage sense of grievance that is evident from the most noticeable voices within evangelicalism. Summary: I find that my own hermeneutic, which leads me to infer a substantially different biblical prioritization of social issues, to be distinctly non-evangelical.

In the popular media evangelicals are identified with one particular political party. That party readily paints the other as "anti-god". That one secular political party should find it advantageous to charge another secular political party as "anti-god" should be of absolutely no surprise to anyone. On the other hand, that so many evangelicals should not have the common sense and simple theological understanding to reject this out of hand, much less find it a reasonable and arguable notion, leaves me stunned and (except for this occasion) almost speechless. When I make this statement myself, and the return response is, "You're just saying that because you're a Democrat," I consider the point to have been verified, if not comprehended.

So after a bit of a rant, I would say that the definition of "evangelical" should include a negative, as well. That negative should be that evangelicals overtly believe in the reality of the kingdom of god that transcends, supercedes, and trumps political and national boundaries. On the contrary, evangelicalism in the United States today is almost inextricably wound up in a pagan and un-biblical civil religion. This goes from the relatively innocuous (as long as no one brings up the subject) of the prominent display of the American flag in most of our churches (I read recently of someone musing provocatively about what we would presume about theological purity of a German church in the 1930s where a Nazi flag was displayed), to support by most evangelicals for preemptive war and torture of "enemy combatants". This civil religion, this heresy really, needs to be overtly denied before I can call myself an evangelical any longer. Even bringing this up bothers me, because there may be those who will read it and question my citizenship, patriotism or love for my country as a result. But an evangelicalism that cannot readily understand this simple distinction -- this clear prioritization of the kingdom of god and resulting concern for all of those who are in the image of god no matter what their nationality over the relatively temporary and contingent (even within the short span of this lifetime) matter of national origin or citizenship -- that evangelicalism is either not evangelicalism, or it should be discarded as at best irrelevant to the gospel, or at worst a heretical and destructive aberration.

Overheard during a mother-daughter phone conversation

"I want to be a whale in the next life. They winter in the Carribean, summer in Massachusetts, gain 15,000 pounds in the process, and everyone says they look good."

(Whale photo shamelessly copied here at Weather Underground)

"Jesus Camp", Global Warming, and evangelicals

My adult Sunday School class is watching and discussing the movie "Jesus Camp"[it's a PCUSA church, and the class members span wide ranges of possible responses to the movie]. This morning we watched the first of three sessions.

The filmmakers highlighted one family that home schools their children, and the film points out that of the homeschools in the U.S., 75% are Christian -- a figure that seems reasonable to me. The hostility of home schooling Christians to evolution is commonly known. Rather than evolution, however, the teacher (a.k.a. the mom) in the film talked about how global warming was not on. For the home schoolers evolution was also bad science, but it was given short shrift compared to global warming. Of course, this bias may be completely a product of editing by the filmmaker; this home schooler might in reality spend much more time "debunking" evolution than global warming. But I'm curious if this (the idea that global warming now, along with evolution, is "bad" science) is a major emphasis of the home school curriculum.

In one sense it might not be as controversial as the evangelical hostility to evolution, since the naive but interested observer of the American scene could very well get the impression that the certainties about global warming are more political than scientific.

However, what is interesting is that global warming is highlighted in this film. One example (the particular family in the film) does not indicate that anti-global warming is an evangelical cause, but there have been dust-ups within the conservative Christisn community over the issue lately, with people like James Dobson coming on strong against it.

Why the hostility? One can understand, perhaps, the hostility to evolution, since that "theory" has implications that are clearly problematic for a six-literal-creation-day view of Genesis. But why would Christians pick on global warming as bad science? I don't remember any preachers getting upset over cold fusion. There are crackpots claiming every day to get energy from water by violating the first law of thermodynamics, and I've yet to hear of an evangelical movement against them.

Of course, I know* why -- the evangelical community, following its leadership is in a very close relationship with the political right, which includes not only conservative Christians, but also right wing secular ideologues (who have no regard for the religious other than the votes they have) and business leaders. These latter, particularly those of the sort that have collected and self-assembled around the Cheney-Bush administration, are very much against the theory of climate change, and consistently do what they can, both in politics and propaganda, to "stay the course" on fossil fuel use and the environment. Their efforts to dis-inform the public on the issues are available for all who have ears to hear and eyes to see.

The evangelical wing of Christianity, of which I once considered myself to be a part, has been playing with the fire of apostasy in its alliance with right wing politicians since the days of Ronald Reagan and the Religious Roundtable. However, it has moved much farther in these last days (i.e., the GW Bush administration), and has allowed its view of the world and the gospel to be manipulated, if not controlled by politics and, in the case of global warming, business interests. It is interesting that evangelicals, who were once representative of many of the poor and marginal in the U.S. (William Jennings Bryan, spokesperson for evangelicals in the early 20th Century, espoused political/social positions that today would be "liberal" and "progressive"), are now the tools of big American business. But for their goals of abortion and gay marriage eradication, evangelicals are indistinguishable politically from the interests of big business and the secular, nationalistic right wing.

*I know that I don't know anything. I (along with 6 billion other people) only believe certain notions with varying degrees of certainty. Thus what I know, which includes what I say about why evangelicals are hostile to the notion of global warming, is merely a personal opinion at which I've arrived, based one would hope on at least some amount of evidence rather than my own hostility or aversion to a particular group.

Anger in men & women

Being perceived as angry is beneficial to men, detrimental & unrewarding to women. My (suppressed) anger -- over the state of the nation and the veil that right wing manipulators and religionists have pulled over the eyes of so many -- is such that, being a man, I ought to be richer than Bill Gates, not to mention King of the World.

Congressmen critique National Petroleum Council on Peak Oil Concerns

http://www.eenews.net/tv/2007/07/23/

What comes up with this link is a video of a brief press conference with Tom Udall (D-NM) and Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md) critiquing the National Petroleum Council's report on peak oil. The site is a good spot to learn about energy and environmental concerns. There is an interesting article, for example, on how livestock farmers can trap and exploit methane from their manure. This reduces their costs, and makes a dent in the production of methane, a greenhouse gas.

[Roscoe Bartlett is an example of a real public servant in my opinion, thanks to his advocacy of peak oil. John Spratt of South Carolina is another, with his concern about fiscal stability, but he has nothing to do with the subject of this post.-- hbf]